Qualcomm debuts SDK and wireless edge service to further IoT ambitions

Over 5 billion humans isn’t quite enough for Qualcomm, the chipset company is eagerly anticipating serving cellular capability to an addressable market of trillions of connected things.

At Qualcomm’s recent 5G Day event, Serge Willenegger, senior vice-president and general manager of 4G/5G and industrial IoT told attendees the company is moving from “addressing a meaningful subset of the economy to essentially the entire economy.”

In its ambitions to get as much of that business as possible, Qualcomm has announced a new LTE Internet of Things software development kit (SDK) for its MDM9206 IoT modem, which is already in commercial use.

The SDK is is designed to help manufacturers and app developers create cellular-enabled IoT apps and products.

Qualcomm hopes customers can use this for a wide range of use cases, including smart metering, smart gateways and asset tracking.

The SDK plays a major part in Qualcomm’s overall IoT strategy, along with its simultaneous announcement of wireless edge services.

The new services introduce a ‘Chipset-as-a-Service’ model, targeting enterprise and industrial IoT customers that need to securely provision, connect and manage the life-cycles of billions of intelligent wireless devices through their cloud platforms.

Wireless edge services are set to be available on select Qualcomm chipsets (including QCA4020 for home IoT products), later arriving on certain Snapdragon chipsets.

Initial support for Qualcomm Wireless Edge Services on certain chipsets is set for the second half of 2018, while the SDK is expected to be available in the first half of the year.